Thanks to Major League Baseball, THOH XXIII will air an hour earlier tonight. That should give you an extra hour before bed to try and forget that you watched it.

Destined to be yet another classic episode, in the opening segment we go back to Ancient times as a Mayan Homer and Marge witness the prediction by the ancient calendar makers that 2012 will be the end of the world.

In “The Greatest Story Ever Holed,” the first of three stories, the Springfield Subatomic Supercollider creates a black hole that terrorizes the city, sucking up everything in its path. In “UNnormal Activity” the Simpsons install cameras all over the house when things start to go bump in the night and Marge discovers it may have to do with an unholy pact she made years prior. In the third tale, “Bart & Homer’s Excellent Adventure,” Bart travels to 1974 to buy a comic book at cover price but inadvertently disrupts Homer & Marge’s courtship, leading Marge to end up with Artie Ziff (guest voice Jon Lovitz).

I got nothing much to say about any of that. Enjoy, or don’t.

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25 Responses to “Sundy Preview: Treehouse of Horror XXIII”

The problem (Ok, one problem) with these specials was when they started airing a week late. This one feels a little too early. Where I’m from, autumn weather hasn’t seeped in, and nobody has their Halloween decorations up.

Really? I live in Indiana and EVERYONE has Halloween decorations up, tree leaves have changed colors, there’s frost outside, and the local “party city” store has briefly turned into a Halloween-costumes-only store for a month. Having said that, it still does feel pretty damn early.

This episode wasn’t funny in the least, I did not laugh one time. Having said that, it’s way better than last year’s, and the Back to the Future (?!) parody (?!??!?!?!) had a clever concept. It wasn’t funny or good but it was an interesting concept. That’s, uh, it.

The AV Club’s gone through a few Simpsons reviewers over the years. They all seem to agree that the classic episodes were better but try to keep an open mind, which results in them often being too nice.

There’s a germ of a good idea in the first paragraph! I read that, and thought “ooh!” Shame it’s Zombie Simpsons, but that’s inventive, timely, and a little bit clever. Unorthodox for a Treehouse of Horror, but it’s a decent take on the ludicrousness of the 2012 doomsmongering.

Which, of course, inevitably means that it’s not one of the three full stories. And I was almost a little bit interested! I’d love to love you again, Simpsons, but not like this.

Is it common practice in the US to include lines like “Destined to be another classic episode?” Because that, to me, sounds a little… off. “It’s going to be amazing, honest, we swear.”

“In the third tale, “Bart & Homer’s Excellent Adventure,” Bart travels to 1974 to buy a comic book at cover price but inadvertently disrupts Homer & Marge’s courtship, leading Marge to end up with Artie Ziff (guest voice Jon Lovitz).”

While derivative of the other time travel episode, I think this could be a good idea, if they did it well. Which I have every confidence that they won’t. This is Zombie Simpsons, after all.

Mayan introduction: bullshit, just time filler. Not even once a good joke. Didn’t explain anything and ended with three badass golems literally smashing the earth. Whatever.

1st story: kinda smiled about the Isotopes joke, but that’s about it. The rest of the story was based on a concept of taking whatever’s left of anything they didn’t simpsonize yet, and… well… simpsonizing it. We end up with some unnecessary gross deaths (Sideshow Mel), which are anything but funny.

2nd story: movie rip-off. Moe being the devil is perhaps original (at least compared to the way they massacred Flanders’ appearances), but context-wise, Ned was by miles the better devil. And Homer peeing in the toilet for over three hours is not ingenuinely funny itself.

3rd story: promising storyline, I’d give them that. But whoa it “crushed and burned”! Why in the name of fuck would Marge suddenly have feeling for Homer if in this storyline, not only did they kinda never met, the only time they did, she was disgusted by him. And it didn’t go any further. Also, what happened to the original Homer? How come he was there, dressed as he is, and knew exactly what was happening? Did he stalk Marge ever since? If so, why didn’t he become a hobo or something? Too many questions… so instead, I just wish to congratulate them for ripping off Family Guy’s “Back to the Pilot” idea, which of course they did. But I can’t, because of how poorly it was done.

I didn’t see the episode, but damn, look how terrible that image is above. Look at the super neat “handwriting” on the blackboard, or how clean and angular all the desks are. How horrible. It’s funny how Groening keeps putting his signature on images that obviously only exist in a computer.

Oddly, my biggest disappointment with the third segment is that we didn’t get to see young Comic Book Guy! Well, that and how Artie Ziff speaks as though he knows exactly what happened to Bart. “…who in THIS universe, was played by Richard Dreyfuss!”

To be fair, both the travel-to-a-previous-episode-episodes were written around the same time and finding out the wife is married to someone else is a time travel cliché, I mean it’s in Back to the Future II.

No they weren’t. Zombie Simpsons bit the dust again. Their idea of fishing for “trend” comes to checking, amongst other things, what their rival shows (i.e. Family Guy) are doing in this time, and simply copying it. Result? Characters acting like robots or like someone else, Scenes and dialogues full of plot elements which go nowhere, enormous time filler (since they can’t do cutaway gags as those are copyrighted FG), etc. In all it looks as pathetic as would Batman if he’d ever started copying Robin out of “popularity”.

Yawn. You’re just looking for stuff so you can poop on the show. Parodying BttF is “trend”? They’re not checking Family Guy on trend anyway. Did you ever hear those smug current writers talk? They think they know what trend is. See Matt Selman interviews. And cutaway gags are copyrighted FG? Even Seth MacFarlane admitted he got the cutaway gags from the Simpsons.

lol, I feel like I’m talking to the cancer that is killing the Simpsons right now. I don’t need to watch interview to know that they’re stealing stuff from the other shows, that people still generally consider crap today. “Back the the Pilot” was a good episode, at least in a couple of years that’s actually something fresh FG is coming up with. The fucking ZS producers just rip it off because they think it’s “trendy” (I don’t put quotes for nothing), because it’s so low that even parodying mediocre show cuts it for them. And I’m not saying the other shows didn’t steal from the Simpsons in the past, I’m saying that right now they’re returning the favor.

But the plot of Bart going to The Way we Was was written +- 9 months and announced +- 2 months before Road to the Pilot aired. How did they steal it? Why would they steal from Family Guy anyway if most of the Simpsons producers on staff right now detest that show? Your cancery points don’t make sense.

Well, in this case it’s even worse because where Family Guy gives us gold (that ep alone was worth watching the whole season), Zombie Simpsons barely shit out anything even remotely close to being funny. In Back to the Pilot, it was hilarious right from the start because they connected every event happened in Death Has a Shadow to some screwing up by Stewie and Brian. And then the whole 9/11 prevention thing. The Simpsons… well, they did it. They crammed up Bart into a sequence from Season 2. That’s it. Everybody laugh now.

And IMO that’s precisely why the two shows steal each other’s plot elements and ideas, because they hate each other. And ZS producers probably hate FG even more because they deal with characters that were created in the late 1980s and still can’t make anything funny out of them anymore. Don’t think they’re that stupid to think that their show is still funny. They know it’s crap. They just don’t wanna admit it because – DUH – it’s TEH SIHMPSOHNS!

To be fair to them, the peeing going on forever joke assumes that folks have seen Paranormal Activity. The shot of Marge standing by the bed whilst the tape fast forwards is a direct lift. The pee needs to go on for ages, whilst the tape winds on and on, because the duration is the joke. It’s sad that this kind of direct spoofing, which doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve seen the original, is what we’re left with nowadays, but still, I thought it was pretty funny. Overall, the episode was mostly awful but there were a few nice touches and decent jokes here and there, so it seems light years ahead of that unwatchable garbage from last week. And better than most recent ToH’s, as well, though that’s not saying a great deal.

IMO Marge standing there for four hours staring at Homer was funnier than him peeing for an hour. That is, of course, if you know that they’re long lost into parodying stuff that they pretend you’ve seen in order to get their jokes.
Treehouse of Horror should be renamed “Treehouse of Ripoff Horror” for that matter.

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